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Although Robert Wilson is best known for his experimental theater works, including several genre-redefining opera collaborations with Philip Glass (most famously, “Einstein on the Beach”), he has created an expansive series of visual art works. Among them is a series of what Mr. Wilson calls “Video Portraits” of artists and performers including Mikhail Baryshnikov, Winona Ryder, Brad Pitt and Isabella Rossellini. He uses high-definition video as the canvas, and costumes, lighting, makeup, gesture and narrative to put his subjects in perspective, usually with references to other art works.

The latest in Mr. Wilson’s series, “23 Video Portraits of Lady Gaga,” will have its first American showing starting July 26 at the Watermill Center, the artists’ and performers’ laboratory that Mr. Wilson founded in 1992 in Water Mill, N.Y. The work, which was first shown at the Louvre, in November, places Lady Gaga into several familiar paintings, replacing their original subjects with the singer. Among the works Mr. Wilson used as his models are Jacques-Louis David’s “The Death of Marat “(1793), Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s “Portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière” (1806) and Andrea Solari’s “Head of Saint John the Baptist” (1507). A fourth portrait, in a contemporary style, shows Lady Gaga in a contemporary vision of Shibari, an ancient Japanese form of rope bondage.

In “The Read Around,” a weekly video feature, authors discuss the when, where and how behind their books. Above, Rebecca Mead discusses “My Life in Middlemarch,” a combination of biography, literary criticism and memoir about George Eliot’s masterpiece.

The film and stage director Atom Egoyan, whose films include “The Sweet Hereafter,” “Chloe” and the coming “Devil’s Knot,” and whose production of Guo Wenjing’s opera “Feng Yi Ting” is part of the Luminato 2013 Premiere Series, talks with Daniel J. Wakin, deputy culture editor at The Times.

The architect Liz Diller, of Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the award-winning architecture firm whose many projects include re-envisioning New York’s Lincoln Center and transforming the High Line into an urban oasis, talks with the Times culture reporter Robin Pogrebin.

The film and stage actor Willem Dafoe and the avant-garde director Robert Wilson, whose staging of “The Life and Death of Marina Abramović” will have its North American premiere at the Luminato Festival, talk with the New York Times contributing culture writer and author John Rockwell.

Some Mother’s Day tributes are less wholesome than others, and thank heaven for that. “Mammas” — a set of short films, two to three minutes each, appearing Sunday on the Sundance Channel and sundancechannel.com — reflects the distinctive character of its creator, Isabella Rossellini: a blend of innocence, sophistication and sly smuttiness. It’s a long way from flowers, chocolates and brunch.

Ms. Rossellini did an earlier set of shorts for Sundance about animals’ sex lives (“Green Porno”). In “Mammas,” she claims to be investigating what constitutes the maternal instinct, which leaves a lot of space for the discussion and depiction of sex and reproduction. What she’s really doing is sending up some of the typical, or stereotypical, complaints about motherhood.

Upset by your stretched-out, child-bearing belly? You could be a cichlid fish, which carries its eggs in its mouth and actually loses weight during pregnancy. Frustrated by trying to feed your family on your spouse’s paltry salary? You could be a dunnock, a bird whose females practice polyandry, taking on two or three husbands when food is scarce.

Ms. Rossellini imparts these lessons by portraying the animals herself, in whimsical and often highly unflattering costumes involving elaborate headgear, extensive padding and lots of plastic garbage bags. The films have the appearance of colorful, mildly surrealistic children’s theater, but the scenes, with Ms. Rossellini’s straight-faced gravitas, are often playfully but strictly adult — as when a cardboard-cutout male cichlid fish, complete with dastardly mustache, sprays what looks like white silly string in her face, fertilizing the eggs in her mouth.

The tone of “Mammas” is questioning and satirical. Celebrating a female spider that turns its body into food for its children, Ms. Rossellini asks, with an increasingly fretful expression: “What’s greater than self-sacrifice? It’s what makes a woman a woman. Isn’t it?”

But she allows herself one quick, quiet moment of Mother’s Day sentiment. Discussing a bird that will pretend to be wounded in order to draw predators away from its nest, she says: “If I were as talented at pretending as the piping plover, I would be a Sarah Bernhardt. An Ingrid Bergman.”